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Old Church Slavonic log | ||
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| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6467 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 9 of 46 26 April 2011 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know all that very well what kind of text there are out there, but I imagine there should be a certain amount on Novgorod. I may be mistaken, but I think a collection of ancient handwritings from Novgorod is to be found in Stockholm (since the Swedes took/stole them in the 17th century). It may have been another city's archives that was taken away; I can't really remember. Apparently, these particular texts are very difficult to interpret due to their special style and I think not all of them have been fully understood. Our professor mentioned them once during a lecture, but as usual I can't remember the details. I visited Novgorod this fall, and tried to interpret some writings on church walls and ceilings (do they have churches in Novgorod...). It didn't go all that very well, except for names (I found my own :P) and very basic words. I tried to take some photos of texts "for later", but my camera turned out to be completely worthless and I just got dark blurry stuff. I have photos of churches though. Perhaps I will post some Novgorod photos on my blog since photos are not all that popular here.
So! It turned out I have actually finished the book I mentioned yesterday; the rest of the book consisted of exercises. Right now I will focus on reading the texts for our class as well as a (long) extract from a book our professor gave us and told us to "get the essence of"; A Linguistic History of Russia To the End of the 18th Century by Vlasto. It's really hard to find any particular essence in this book, and it's rather annoying to read because it's written in... abbreviations! And hello rahdonit! Thank you for your links! I am hoping to learn to read fluently in Ukrainian one day, by the way. Perhaps that will be a continuation of this log sometime in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4753 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 10 of 46 26 April 2011 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | ||
The logical step being Polish first, and then using your Russian and Polish to get Ukrainian. ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rahdonit Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie Ukraine Joined 6403 days ago 50 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English, German | Message 11 of 46 27 April 2011 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||
Feel free to contact me, should you have any questions about Ukrainian or Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6467 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 12 of 46 27 April 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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So it turned out I don't have such a poor memory after all. I had some time to kill today before my Slavic language history class, so I decided to flip through our 100 page booklet with old texts. At the very end, there's a text from the Novgorod archives - and an explanatory text about how the Swedes occupied Novgorod from 1611 to 1617, and how they took the archives with them back to Sweden. This was after all a fortunate thing, because this collection has remained intact whereas many other such collections have been destroyed in fires. The collection in Stockholm is the biggest one outside of the Slavic countries, and because it's written in skoropis', it's difficult to interpret. In our booklet there is one text that has been interpreted by a Swedish slavic scholar. The text is a letter from a window to the Swedish occupying powers ;) I read through it, and got perhaps 30 or 40%, but since this particular text has no glossary (and has letters piled on top of each other all over the place) I'm going to let it wait.
I also saw several snippets from Novgorod elm's bark writings. Our little booklet is actually brilliant! However, it's a poor idea to start with these texts because they are quite different from other old Slavic texts. They contain more oral language and are decidedly Eastern Slavic, for example mixing ь and е, ъ and о, jat' and e. There's also such things as городе instead of город for nominative. And I don't need more confusion right now! We finished our first text today. I'm not sure what it's called, if it's called anything, but in Norwegian it's Innkallelsessegnet" (... "the legend of the summoning", or something like that), where the (OCS names here) slovene, vse, krivichi, chiodi etc. go across the sea to the varjagi (Vikings) to ask them come rule over them and create order. Perhaps not the most popular text in Russia? :P Our next text, and also our last because we only have two lectures left, will be "Oleg takes Kiev". I'm also going to read a text from what seems to be called "The pannonic legends", concerning the vita of Kirill and Methodius. This text has a very extensive glossary, so I think it's a good idea to start with it in order to build vocabulary. However, I can record some progress. Without actually studying it, I have learned at least one aorist pattern. And I'm able to recognize some imperfective forms and participles. There are two interesting grammatical features of old church slavonic that I was going to write about here, mostly just for my own sake, but this post is already quite long so I'll do that tomorrow instead. Edited by tricoteuse on 27 April 2011 at 10:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6467 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 13 of 46 28 April 2011 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I posted some Novgorod photos, and wrote a bit about the city here for those, who like myself, have an unhealthy interest in old stuff.
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| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6467 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 14 of 46 02 May 2011 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I finished reading the text about Oleg (you can see the whole text in my handwriting here). Even though many of the words in the beginning were quite familiar, it was quite difficult at first to understand the actual events. We kind of take punctuation for granted these days, and only when you have to read something that doesn't really use anything to show where one sentence ends and another one begins you realize what an excellent innovation punctuation really is. When I was reading this text I didn't know that jako introduces direct or indirect speech, I only happened to pick that up on Wikipedia afterwards. If I'd known that, it would have been a lot easier since the text contains a couple of instances of direct speech. However, I did have a translation of the text into standard Russian (in which it still sounds weird) so I managed. This evening I have a friend coming over for some Slavic language history assistance, so then I will hopefully go over some of these things again.
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| nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5358 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French | Message 15 of 46 02 May 2011 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the photos! Especially the ones with the doggies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6467 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 16 of 46 08 May 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad you liked the dogs :)
--- I don't have all that much to update. I don't feel like I have been very productive lately, but then I have been somewhat busy reviewing for exams, and that doesn't really yield any tangible results. As far as OCS is concerned, I have been memorizing sequences of sound changes and read some in our text about the evolution of Russian morphology. I have read the first part of what I suspect to be the Vita of Kirill and Methodius. I don't really understand why our book doesn't mention the Russian names for these manuscripts; the Norwegian names are of very little use to me. The first part is very short, and rather easy to understand, but I did run into some forms that I haven't been able to identify. If anyone can enlighten me on the exact grammatical category of these forms (not just the meaning of the words), then please do so. běaše mladěi The snippet they are from: ...otъ nikhъže běaše mladěi, sedmъи, konstantinъ filosofъ, nastavьnikъ i učitelь našь Unfortunately, that's all I have to update since this log does not concern my other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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